As a new webmaster, you might have waited and waited for your website to be indexed by the search engines. Maybe Google or Yahoo's spider came by your website once or twice, indexed your main page but never did a "deep crawl", which means visiting and indexing the rest of your website's pages. Believe it or not, this is what usually happens to websites within the first month of being online.
What if you had hundreds of fresh content pages just lying around on your website, all linked properly through your top-down menu structure, and had a picture perfect site map, but you still had to wait for the search engine spiders to find your website important enough to fully index your entire website.
What if I told you that there is a new technique that could literally force the Yahoo spider to index your new pages, and even your whole website, almost immediately? Folks, we're talking in less than 2 hours!
This is something that many people in the Internet Marketing and Search Engine crowd have been talking about as of late, and it's called the "blog and ping technique"
Blogging, like I told you in an earlier issue, has become an important tool for new businesses looking to get their websites indexed quickly in search engines. You can easily use your blog as a content management tool and benefit from the added importance that search engines give to blogs.
But now, you can flip that around and use your blog to drive search engine spiders to your website at will!
What is the Blog and Ping technique?
Here's how the whole “blog and ping” routine works:
First, let's say you've just added some new content to your website (created a new web page) OR you've created an entirely new website that hasn't been indexed by the search engines yet.
Now, in order for the search engines to rank your new web page or website, you need them to visit your new page. How do you do this? Well, you could go out and get other websites to link directly to this page. Depending on the Page Rank of your website, you could wait a few days and hope that the search engines would eventually crawl your site and end up at your new page... OR you could use the blog and ping technique to get your new page crawled in a few hours!
Ok, in order to use the blog and ping technique, you need to create a blog, as I taught you in an earlier lesson . It's free and only takes a few minutes to do.
Search engine spiders love blog content – it's fresh, regularly updated and is the best online community tool around.
Since the “blog and ping” technique involves the Yahoo search engine spider, let's look at how you can alert the Yahoo spider to come visit your blog.
The easiest way to attract the Yahoo spider to your blog is to:
Create a My Yahoo account
Add your blog as content on your personalized Yahoo page (don't worry, I'll explain all this later on). In simple terms, this means that there is a link within the My Yahoo website (on your personalized page) which you will point to your blog.
Once you've done this, Yahoo gives you the option to notify them that you've added new content to your blog. This is called "pinging". When you "ping" Yahoo, they will quickly visit your blog and follow all links from your blog page. Thus indexing whatever pages you have a link pointing to!
Now that you can bring the Yahoo search engine spider to your blog at will, it's time to take this technique a bit further and use your blog as a launching pad for the Yahoo spider to index your website or any pages that you want.
All you need to do is to post new entries in your blogs containing links to the pages that you want indexed into your blog. That way, when the Yahoo spider reaches your blog and sees the new post, it will automatically follow the links in that post, and index any page that you want it to index!
Steps to daily indexing
Start a blog
Create a Yahoo account
Add your blog's RSS feed into your My Yahoo account
Make a few posts in your blog
Ping Yahoo
Repeat
Let's look at each step, one by one.
Step 1: Start a blog
This is really easy to do, and I've covered this in a previous lesson. The idea is to use a free blog service such as Blogger (owned by Google) to quickly set up your new blog – it takes under 10 minutes.
If you already have your own blog (either through Blogger or any other blogging service), then you're all set.
Either way, on to step 2.
Step 2: Create a Yahoo account
You most likely will have a Yahoo account. If you don't, then use the following link:
Sign up with Yahoo!
This is the same ‘regulation' sign up form/procedure that you see on most online services. Once you've signed up, you will have a Yahoo username and password. Note that down somewhere (e.g. in a text file on your PC) because you'll need that information in the next step.
Step 3: Configure My Yahoo
Yahoo's personalized portal is called My Yahoo and is ridiculously easy to use. You access it by going to the My Yahoo page, and then signing in to your Yahoo account from the box on the left (see screenshot below). Use the username and password you got from the previous step.
Signed in? Great. Now let's go back to your blog. If you remember from the start of this lesson, the idea is to use your blog's RSS feed and add it to your My Yahoo page. My Yahoo works as an advanced RSS reader by aggregating different content feeds (of your choice) on the same page. If you want to add more content to your My Yahoo page, you do it by either selecting content from the Yahoo directory or by adding an RSS feed directly through a URL.
Anyway, how it works is not important if you didn't understand that. The important thing to know is you need to add your blog's RSS feed to your Yahoo page. This is basically just a "special link" to let Yahoo know where your blog is located, so they know where to go. To do this, follow these steps:
Sign in to your Blogger account.
You'll notice my username is "bradstestblog"
Select your blog from the Blogger Dashboard.
My blog is called "Brad's Test Blog"
Go to Settings (2nd tab from the left).
Select Site Feed from the sub-menu tabs (6th tab from the left).
Find the Site Feed URL on the page and either copy it or write it down somewhere.
Go back to your My Yahoo page. Login to your account and...
Select ‘Add Content' (It's located on the left middle portion of the page).
Select ‘Add RSS by URL' – right next to the ‘Find Content' search box.
Paste the copied RSS URL into the box and press Add
Click the “Add to My Yahoo” button on the next page.
Once this is done, you can return to your My Yahoo page and if you scroll down, you'll see that your blog's feed is now added to the page.
Post on your Blog
After you've added your blog's feed to your Yahoo page, it's time to get to the real meat of the action.
Remember, this is supposed to get your website indexed by the Yahoo spider as quickly as possible .
So in your blog, when you are making your first post, include a link to your website . If your website is already indexed and you're looking to get new pages indexed , you can include them in the post as well.
As a rule of thumb, don't stuff 10 or 20 links into one post. That could trigger spam filters and make life a lot worse for your website. Instead, stick to 4 or 5 links per post. Keep relevant anchor text (these are links, after all), and use some descriptive content around your links (one more reason to keep the number of links limited).
While this strategy will guarantee quick indexing of your website through Yahoo, it does not require that you ignore good SEO practices or do something that will possibly mark your website / blog out as spam.
Ping Yahoo
Ok, so now that you've made your post and put up links to your website, all that's left to do is to “Ping Yahoo”, which will basically tell Yahoo that there's a new blog post on your blog, and that the Yahoo spider should come check it out.
Like I told you in the beginning, once the spider comes to your blog, it will see the new blog post, follow the links to your website and start indexing your pages!
So how do you ping Yahoo? You can use the following web address:
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping?u=[your blog address]
where the text after “ping?u” is in fact your blog's web address. So if your blog was at http://bradstestblog.blogspot.com , the ping URL will then read:
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping?u=[http://bradstestblog.blogspot.com]
Just copy and paste the URL (complete with your blog's web address at the end) into your browser and click Go (or press Enter). This will automatically ping the My Yahoo page containing your blog's RSS Feed, and this essentially tells the Yahoo spider that it needs to visit the blog to update the content in its index.
Repeat
That's it! You can use this “blog and ping” tactic to literally transform your website from an ignored mess of thousands and thousands of pages into a hub that search engines visit every single day.
In closing...
It's good to know how the basics of the "blog and ping" technique work, but if you're lazy like you me you might want to check out the software product I use to do this, because it automates all of this for you. You basically just plug a link to your blog into the software. Click "go" and the software takes care of "blogging and pinging" all of your website's pages so there's no need to manually do all the steps above. And usually within 1-2 days all of my webpages have been indexed by Yahoo. It's a pretty slick little idea really, and quite frankly, I wish I would have came up with the idea myself because I know an aweful lot of people find it very useful.
The tool I'm talking about is called "Blogging Equalizer". It's a simple little program, but automates things very well.
That wraps up this lesson. Hope you've found it enlightening and start to use this technique to get your new websites indexed quickly. It works really well if done correctly.
What if you had hundreds of fresh content pages just lying around on your website, all linked properly through your top-down menu structure, and had a picture perfect site map, but you still had to wait for the search engine spiders to find your website important enough to fully index your entire website.
What if I told you that there is a new technique that could literally force the Yahoo spider to index your new pages, and even your whole website, almost immediately? Folks, we're talking in less than 2 hours!
This is something that many people in the Internet Marketing and Search Engine crowd have been talking about as of late, and it's called the "blog and ping technique"
Blogging, like I told you in an earlier issue, has become an important tool for new businesses looking to get their websites indexed quickly in search engines. You can easily use your blog as a content management tool and benefit from the added importance that search engines give to blogs.
But now, you can flip that around and use your blog to drive search engine spiders to your website at will!
What is the Blog and Ping technique?
Here's how the whole “blog and ping” routine works:
First, let's say you've just added some new content to your website (created a new web page) OR you've created an entirely new website that hasn't been indexed by the search engines yet.
Now, in order for the search engines to rank your new web page or website, you need them to visit your new page. How do you do this? Well, you could go out and get other websites to link directly to this page. Depending on the Page Rank of your website, you could wait a few days and hope that the search engines would eventually crawl your site and end up at your new page... OR you could use the blog and ping technique to get your new page crawled in a few hours!
Ok, in order to use the blog and ping technique, you need to create a blog, as I taught you in an earlier lesson . It's free and only takes a few minutes to do.
Search engine spiders love blog content – it's fresh, regularly updated and is the best online community tool around.
Since the “blog and ping” technique involves the Yahoo search engine spider, let's look at how you can alert the Yahoo spider to come visit your blog.
The easiest way to attract the Yahoo spider to your blog is to:
Create a My Yahoo account
Add your blog as content on your personalized Yahoo page (don't worry, I'll explain all this later on). In simple terms, this means that there is a link within the My Yahoo website (on your personalized page) which you will point to your blog.
Once you've done this, Yahoo gives you the option to notify them that you've added new content to your blog. This is called "pinging". When you "ping" Yahoo, they will quickly visit your blog and follow all links from your blog page. Thus indexing whatever pages you have a link pointing to!
Now that you can bring the Yahoo search engine spider to your blog at will, it's time to take this technique a bit further and use your blog as a launching pad for the Yahoo spider to index your website or any pages that you want.
All you need to do is to post new entries in your blogs containing links to the pages that you want indexed into your blog. That way, when the Yahoo spider reaches your blog and sees the new post, it will automatically follow the links in that post, and index any page that you want it to index!
Steps to daily indexing
Start a blog
Create a Yahoo account
Add your blog's RSS feed into your My Yahoo account
Make a few posts in your blog
Ping Yahoo
Repeat
Let's look at each step, one by one.
Step 1: Start a blog
This is really easy to do, and I've covered this in a previous lesson. The idea is to use a free blog service such as Blogger (owned by Google) to quickly set up your new blog – it takes under 10 minutes.
If you already have your own blog (either through Blogger or any other blogging service), then you're all set.
Either way, on to step 2.
Step 2: Create a Yahoo account
You most likely will have a Yahoo account. If you don't, then use the following link:
Sign up with Yahoo!
This is the same ‘regulation' sign up form/procedure that you see on most online services. Once you've signed up, you will have a Yahoo username and password. Note that down somewhere (e.g. in a text file on your PC) because you'll need that information in the next step.
Step 3: Configure My Yahoo
Yahoo's personalized portal is called My Yahoo and is ridiculously easy to use. You access it by going to the My Yahoo page, and then signing in to your Yahoo account from the box on the left (see screenshot below). Use the username and password you got from the previous step.
Signed in? Great. Now let's go back to your blog. If you remember from the start of this lesson, the idea is to use your blog's RSS feed and add it to your My Yahoo page. My Yahoo works as an advanced RSS reader by aggregating different content feeds (of your choice) on the same page. If you want to add more content to your My Yahoo page, you do it by either selecting content from the Yahoo directory or by adding an RSS feed directly through a URL.
Anyway, how it works is not important if you didn't understand that. The important thing to know is you need to add your blog's RSS feed to your Yahoo page. This is basically just a "special link" to let Yahoo know where your blog is located, so they know where to go. To do this, follow these steps:
Sign in to your Blogger account.
You'll notice my username is "bradstestblog"
Select your blog from the Blogger Dashboard.
My blog is called "Brad's Test Blog"
Go to Settings (2nd tab from the left).
Select Site Feed from the sub-menu tabs (6th tab from the left).
Find the Site Feed URL on the page and either copy it or write it down somewhere.
Go back to your My Yahoo page. Login to your account and...
Select ‘Add Content' (It's located on the left middle portion of the page).
Select ‘Add RSS by URL' – right next to the ‘Find Content' search box.
Paste the copied RSS URL into the box and press Add
Click the “Add to My Yahoo” button on the next page.
Once this is done, you can return to your My Yahoo page and if you scroll down, you'll see that your blog's feed is now added to the page.
Post on your Blog
After you've added your blog's feed to your Yahoo page, it's time to get to the real meat of the action.
Remember, this is supposed to get your website indexed by the Yahoo spider as quickly as possible .
So in your blog, when you are making your first post, include a link to your website . If your website is already indexed and you're looking to get new pages indexed , you can include them in the post as well.
As a rule of thumb, don't stuff 10 or 20 links into one post. That could trigger spam filters and make life a lot worse for your website. Instead, stick to 4 or 5 links per post. Keep relevant anchor text (these are links, after all), and use some descriptive content around your links (one more reason to keep the number of links limited).
While this strategy will guarantee quick indexing of your website through Yahoo, it does not require that you ignore good SEO practices or do something that will possibly mark your website / blog out as spam.
Ping Yahoo
Ok, so now that you've made your post and put up links to your website, all that's left to do is to “Ping Yahoo”, which will basically tell Yahoo that there's a new blog post on your blog, and that the Yahoo spider should come check it out.
Like I told you in the beginning, once the spider comes to your blog, it will see the new blog post, follow the links to your website and start indexing your pages!
So how do you ping Yahoo? You can use the following web address:
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping?u=[your blog address]
where the text after “ping?u” is in fact your blog's web address. So if your blog was at http://bradstestblog.blogspot.com , the ping URL will then read:
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping?u=[http://bradstestblog.blogspot.com]
Just copy and paste the URL (complete with your blog's web address at the end) into your browser and click Go (or press Enter). This will automatically ping the My Yahoo page containing your blog's RSS Feed, and this essentially tells the Yahoo spider that it needs to visit the blog to update the content in its index.
Repeat
That's it! You can use this “blog and ping” tactic to literally transform your website from an ignored mess of thousands and thousands of pages into a hub that search engines visit every single day.
In closing...
It's good to know how the basics of the "blog and ping" technique work, but if you're lazy like you me you might want to check out the software product I use to do this, because it automates all of this for you. You basically just plug a link to your blog into the software. Click "go" and the software takes care of "blogging and pinging" all of your website's pages so there's no need to manually do all the steps above. And usually within 1-2 days all of my webpages have been indexed by Yahoo. It's a pretty slick little idea really, and quite frankly, I wish I would have came up with the idea myself because I know an aweful lot of people find it very useful.
The tool I'm talking about is called "Blogging Equalizer". It's a simple little program, but automates things very well.
That wraps up this lesson. Hope you've found it enlightening and start to use this technique to get your new websites indexed quickly. It works really well if done correctly.
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